Money News

UBS is a commitment that is expressed, not as a sum, but as a share of gross domestic product

The operative word is “shares”: Even with indexation, the UBI is a fixed commitment. What happens as national income or profits continue to rise in an automated world? Is no share to be passed on to the population? Must we be reduced to annual debates about how to adjust the UBI? One can imagine that such debates would constitute a continuing sequence of nightmares. 

I’m going to propose a simple amendment of the UBI that holds out serious hope of dealing with all these issues and more. I’m going to call it the universal basic share, or UBS. It is a commitment that is expressed, not as a sum, but as a share. Specifically, I propose that we commit a fixed fraction of our GDP to the provision of a universal income for all.

Americans believe in the importance of a good day’s work. And so it’s understandable that the prospect of a universal basic income (UBI), in which the government would issue checks to cover the basic costs of living, rubs some people the wrong way. 

But even if some people did stop working, they might wind up contributing to society in other meaningful ways. People who perform the unpaid labor of taking care of children or elderly family members, for example, are certainly doing important work. UBI would simply provide a means of compensating this type of labor efficiently.

And historically, many of mankind’s most groundbreaking achievements have come from people with the luxury of plentiful leisure time. As economist Forget notes in an interview with Freakonomics: “If you look at the 18th and at the 19th century, some of the great scientific breakthroughs and some of the great cultural breakthroughs were made by people who did not work.”